O

ne of the things we think we know about war is that it is physical, a matter of brute force, an arena where argument ceases to matter. Victory and defeat may be formalized by treaties, but they are in essence blunt physical facts, incontestably there in advance of any commentary. There is even a sort of guilty pleasure in the supposed clarity of war's verdict, the way it transcends and pre-empts debate, like a punch to somebody's jaw in the movies.

But in fact most wars are rhetorical projects, it turns out — efforts of persuasion, continuations of debate by other means. The violence is not just material, but inescapably didactic, exemplary, symbolic; it serves as proposition or proof in a larger argument. The destruction of an army or a town, though a grievous injury in itself, is most importantly a message that reads in effect: “Look, here’s what I can do to you; and I will do it again, and worse, if we do not reach some new understanding.” The mayhem never quite takes the form that would be mechanically most efficient,  but is continually warped by a frantic effort of communication.

Of course there are exceptions, wars throughout history where one side really does seek the other's complete physical destruction. The Mongols who scourged Asia and Europe in the thirteenth century often executed entire populations. The Nazis marched east in 1941 intent on depopulating the Slavic lands outright, though they were shrewd enough not to disclose this at once. The Indian Wars in North America, and similar initiatives launched against native populations around the globe, often amounted to de facto wars of extermination, though the perpetrators generally lacked the Mongols' refreshing candor.

Such asymmetrical holocausts are rightly remembered with guilt and revulsion; yet tribal warfare by itself is hardly less apocalyptic, notwithstanding politically correct fantasies of the Peaceful Native. As Steven Pinker points out in The Blank Slate, the likelihood of a male Yanomamo dying in battle, in a lifetime largely devoted to it, is something like one in three; Azar Gat, in the recent War in Human Civilization, offers 25 to 30 percent as a good rough figure for tribal war everywhere. The corresponding odds for a modern European male have been one in fifty, even in a time span that includes the catastrophes of World Wars I and II. [1] Russian casualties in World War II, by some estimates 9 percent of the nation’s 1941 population, just reach the low end of what is customary in tribal warfare; German casualties, at 5 percent, barely get into the game, while the U.S. figure of 0.2 percent makes our war seem, by the standards of hunters and gatherers, a day in the park. [2] When historians speak of Napoleon or Hitler or the hapless architects of World War I as having inaugurated “all-out war,” the description must be understood as strictly relative to the proximate historical eras and cultures. No war is more extreme than that of indigenous populations already fighting for subsistence.

Given this, we would expect the conduct of tribal warfare to be ruthlessly mechanical, utterly given over to the physical imperatives of destruction and defense. Yet the truth appears to be very different. The anthropologist Marvin Harris, drawing on an account by C.W. Harris and Arnold Pilling, offers this account of a battle between rival branches of the Tiwi people of Australia:

This really is “total war,” with the entire populations of the two sides engaged, and no exemption granted to women or the old; yet what happens is anything but violence of the most physically efficient sort. Strangely hedged in by convention and etiquette, the encounter proceeds spasmodically, tentatively, regretfully, with an eerie alternation of combat and argument. The deadliest warriors, the young men, are held in reserve while the weakest begin skirmishes that look like parody. Debate continues even after spears are flying, and repeatedly pre-empts the physical combat, with both sides entirely foregoing the advantages of surprise. Granted, such scenes are far from the whole story of tribal warfare; Harris goes on to note that, “Among the Dani of . . . New Guinea, warfare has an open-field, ritualistic phase (which resembles the encounters described for the Tiwi) in which casualties are light. But there are also sneak attacks resulting in a hundred fatalities at a time and in the destruction of whole villages” (263). Anthropologists agree that ambushes account for the great majority of all casualties in tribal warfare; the horrific dawn raid depicted in Mel Gibson's recent film Apocalypto appears to give a pretty fair picture of life in what Gat calls "the human State of Nature," a condition far more Hobbesian than Rousseauvian. But given that such stakes are on the table, the restraint of the ritualistic phase seems all the more remarkable.

War at the tribal level, then, is at least sometimes a strangely scripted and garrulous business. At the state level it seems less so, but this is to some extent an illusion, arising in tandem with the semblance of greater mortality and fearsomeness. What happens in the grand march of civilization is that war, like everything else, becomes a specialty. On the one hand, the task of fighting devolves to a warrior elite, a “kleptocracy,” in Jared Diamond’s term, which claims a disproportionate share of society’s riches in exchange for its commitment, via appropriately thanatonic codes and customs, to civil defense. On the other hand the underprivileged, the spare males inexorably created in each generation, provide natural cannon fodder. “They fill a pit as well as better,” as Falstaff remarks during his brief stint as a recruiting sergeant. The new system makes war both safer and more dangerous. Militaries are universally more proficient and deadly than militias, capable of vastly greater violence. But the whole point of having this capacity, for most states most of the time, is to forego using it. The military’s true function is not war-fighting, but threat and deterrence; it is really one vast signal corps, continually broadcasting the same message — “Don’t mess with us!” — in all the varied dialects of army, navy, air force, and marines. Of course, the message is more convincing to the extent that the forces really can wreak unspeakable violence on property and persons. When battle comes at last in spite of everything (often at the behest of excessively literal-minded leaders), it is far more intense and efficient than in tribal warfare, turning places like Little Round Top and Okinawa into true hells on earth; but it is far more rare, and has been quarantined (though with frequent lapses) to a smaller segment of the population. Foul-mouthed old men and women no longer figure as eligible combatants, and in the event of decisive victory, extermination can give way to gentler practices like decimation and slavery.

Under this new dispensation, the violence of battle assumes a representative quality, as if one were taking a poll; it matters in itself, but matters most as a token of what is possible. It is no longer necessary to kill whole populations; killing of the duly appointed military representatives will do, and sometimes only a fraction of that fraction. Genocide remains a recurrent pitfall and chronic temptation, but on the whole is simply a poor option. Ham-fisted and impolitic, it tends to miscarry and trigger reprisals in kind, and even if it does not, instinctive resistance to it seems deeply implanted. The gradual rallying of peaceable folk to resist an initially terrifying aggressor is an archetype not just of literature and popular culture, from Macbeth to High Noon to Lord of the Rings, but of history, where the initial successes of a Xerxes II, an Attila, a First Crusade, or a Hitler are eventually rolled back for reasons that (insofar as one can make the distinction) are more political than military. In the very act of prevailing on the battlefield, the victor makes himself so terrifying and repellent that allies peel away and neutrals scurry to the opposing banner, and defeat is conjured from victory.

At the state level even more than the tribal level, thus, war has a way of defying any neat physical logic; it cannot be reduced to an engineering problem, but insists on being a messy problem in human relations, suffused with paradox. At the close of World War I, the victorious Allies dictated terms to defeated Germany that were intended to keep her permanently weak and forever incapable of repeating the aggressions of 1914. The result was Germany’s emergence, barely two decades later, as the most terrifying power on earth, one that marched all the way to the Channel this time, took Paris, menaced Moscow, and invaded Africa for good measure. It was not that the material measures failed in themselves; but they were trumped in spades by the purely human force of national rage. Only a fraction of a state’s strength is committed to fighting in the first place, so a surplus of motivation can nicely compensate for a deficit of physical resources. For similar reasons, all of today’s most terrifying rogue states are sinks of material deprivation and misery; but the non-physical alchemy of political and religious passion — helped out, admittedly, by advanced arms technology — converts their weakness into a strength so formidable that, amazingly, the advanced industrial states have more to fear from the Irans and the Afghanistans than from each other.

The military conundrum, then, seems to be this: how to win, but without terrifying allies and neutrals into forming a hostile coalition, and in a way that persuades the enemy that something is to be gained from capitulation, both now and into the future. In our modern shorthand, victory must be political as well as military. The most fearsome weapons, the bloodiest and most brilliant tactics, avail nothing if in their wake new enemies replace the old, or the survivors’ best option is to renew the struggle. Thus battle itself takes on a forensic and theatrical quality; it is not just a mechanical operation, but a negotiation, and also a performance directed at an audience. Just winning is not enough; you must win in a certain way, driving home the requisite lessons to all who are not actually killed, including the eager third-party spectators who invariably gather on the sidelines of your bilateral misfortune. Specifically, the lessons are two, and of almost opposite import: “I am so strong and determined that it is hopeless to resist me”; but also, “Don’t be afraid; you can trust me and cooperate with me.”

It is a mistake to think that even the first lesson can be adequately imparted by collecting enemy heads in a huge pile near the city gate, as the Assyrian emperors used to enjoy doing. Damage and death in themselves can be curiously unpersuasive. The flu epidemic that followed upon the armistice of 1918, as is often pointed out, caused more death than the previous four and a half years of fighting, and the score of casualties, if anyone bothered to check, must have favored one side or another. But the flu deaths had no political significance, because of course they were the result of no one’s deliberate action; death was just death in this case, not a promise of worse to come. To be persuasive a catastrophic result must be the result of someone’s action, and it must seem repeatable, and thereby proof of categorical and continuing superiority. The Japanese “sneak attack” on Pearl Harbor served only to enrage America and destroy any possibility of a negotiated end to the war it began. What ultimately mattered was not the tonnage on the bottom but the sensibility of the American public, to whom the brilliantly executed operation seemed like a sucker punch. To propose a wildly anachronistic analogy, it resembled Mike Tyson's misguided attempt, a few years back, to regain the heavyweight championship by biting off a morsel of Evander Holyfield's ear: damage was done, but so what? Real physical superiority was not proved, and the surprise could never be repeated. The atom bombs that ended the war, by contrast, were persuasive not just because of the hideous injury given, but because they came as the coda to three and a half years of fighting, and because of the entirely credible prospect of what Truman called “a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.”

Likewise, the plodding progress of eastern and western Allies as they closed in on Hitler, in campaigns not widely admired by military historians, had the forensic advantage of seeming machinelike and inevitable. The victory depended on no one’s genius or daring or good luck, and so was all the more convincing, and the postwar good behavior of Germany may owe something to this. The “element of surprise” in war is widely celebrated, but in the end the element of leaden predictability may be more valuable. Nothing is more intimidating than an opponent who lays out exactly what he intends to do to you, then does it. More often than one would expect, the great military geniuses, the Hannibals and Napoleons, the Rommels and Robert E. Lees, end up as losers, vanquished by far less inspired and colorful opponents. One reason may be that the brilliant victory, accomplished by inspired novelty and unusual daring, fails to convince the loser that his luck will not be better next time. After Cannae you bounce back, but the meat grinder of Petersburg or the Eastern Front settles you for good.

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